Missouri lawmaker: ‘Reprehensible' Abraham Lincoln statues should be taken down

A Republican member of the Missouri House of Representatives has said the “reprehensible” statues of former US President Abraham Lincoln should be taken down in the name of fairness following the removal of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond, Virginia, this week.

“If we insist on tearing down statues of reprehensible people, let's at least be fair and balanced about it,” Lovasco tweeted.

The 21-foot (6.4-meter) bronze statue of the US Civil War leader, Lee, was removed on Wednesday, after a yearlong legal battle over a monument that has been the focus of protests over racial injustice.

A crane hoisted it off its 40-foot (12.2-meter) granite pedestal and placed it on the ground. Since 1890, the towering memorial has stood at its location on Monument Avenue in Richmond, the former capital of the pro-slavery Confederacy, a group of Southern states that fought against Union forces in the 1861-65 Civil War.

“Virginia’s largest monument to the Confederate insurrection will come down this week,” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) said in a press release on Monday. “This is an important step in showing who we are and what we value as a commonwealth.”

Lovasco followed up on his initial tweet, writing, “It's unfortunate how many people think saying ‘Lincoln was reprehensible’ equals some kind of support for the Confederacy, especially given the context of my tweet. It's quite possible to point out that neither Lincoln nor Lee where [sic] good people deserving of honor.”

Was Lincoln ‘reprehensible’?

Press TV asked American journalist Don Debar that why some people call Lincoln “reprehensible. He said, “To me, the word 'incomprehensible' seems more appropriate here.”

“There are, of course, the actual events that have happened, and the historical context to each of them over the course of human development,” he said.

“Then there are a body of maleducated people - who spend much too much time stroking their beliefs as if these were attached to their gonads and even more time running their mouths about things they know nothing about - who are easily grouped into opposing pairs and then encouraged to scream at each other at the top of their lungs without any knowledge or understanding of the subject matter they believe themselves to be debating. They are, in their own minds, ‘exceptional’ - and they're trained and encouraged to suffer behavior that includes mass murder, genocide and oppression generally. There's a combined sense of impunity and overall arrogance that operates as the context for these arguments in our culture. The very idea of whether or not Lincoln was a good or bad person is not only irrelevant but childishly simplistic. And most of the people who have really strong opinions about it don't know anything about any of the actual factual history, nor do they have any understanding of the mechanical processes of a dynamic human history,” the journalist explained.

“But, really, this is another example of culture wars that are manufactured and stoked to keep us divided over symbology while ignoring material reality. These symbolic rumbles are the primary controversies between the Democratic and Republican parties, and they are stoked to make it appear as if they were actual differences while both parties support a trillion-dollar military, multiple wars, impoverishment of the working and middle classes, and a surveillance society that will soon be assigning an individual proctologist to each citizen for detailed observation purposes,” he noted.

Charlottesville removes Confederate statue at center of deadly 2017 protest

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.

Efforts by civil rights groups and others to destroy the Confederate monuments, such as the controversial “Silent Sam” statue on the campus of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, gained momentum six years ago after a 21-year-old white supremacist, Dylann Roof, opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, leaving nine African-American worshipers dead in June 2015.

According to the US media reports, nearly 168 Confederate symbols have been removed across the United States only in 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.

The Confederate battle flag was first raised atop the South Carolina State House in 1962, as part of the US Civil War centennial commemoration.

"Meanwhile, Black folks' wealth and incomes continue to steadily decline, both in real and relative terms. Africa is now essentially a colony of the Pentagon, thanks to Africom. Mass incarceration is still a reality. The police murders of young black men have not subsided, but have rather been expanded to include unarmed white women. But the statues are coming down and that's what's being debated," DeBar concluded.

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